The Dead Island severed-torso statue returns

Despite apologies from developer Deep Silver, it seems that the Zombie Bait edition of Dead Island: Riptide is on sale.

(Credit: Deep Silver)

After the initial backlash over the severed female torso statuette that was the centrepiece of the Zombie Bait Edition of Dead Island: Riptide, developer Deep Silver offered the following apology:

For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island. We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver's entire international team today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry how deeply sorry we are and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again.

It appears that this apology was in no means a retraction of the edition, with the aforementioned torso still available on sale, even in Australia.

Reports on Twitter of people purchasing the Zombie Edition have started, along with listings on the Big W website (although the site currently states that it is out of stock). Some photos of the statue show an Australian flag bikini, rather than the Union Jack flag bikini previously seen.

The Australian and New Zealand special editions of Dead Island Riptide are the Survivor Edition available through EB Games, and the Pre-Order Edition available through JB Hi-Fi. An extremely limited quantity of the Zombie Bait edition has been made available to some retailers for those customers who wish to purchase it.